The world of private banking is undergoing tremendous change. Regulatory pressures combined with intensive competition are forcing the world's oldest and most respected banks, the Swiss banquiers, to look beyond their national borders and concentrate on exporting their domestic success into the...

This study empirically analyzes the historical performance of defaulted debt from Moody’s Ultimate Recovery Database (1987-2010). Motivated by a stylized structural model of credit risk with systematic recovery risk, we argue and find evidence that returns on defaulted debt co-vary with...

Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform regulations and other postcrisis regulations and guidelines have put enormous pressure on financial institutions to optimize the use of their scarce capital and to improve their return on equity (ROE) which has been significantly compressed compared to historical...

In this study we survey practices and supervisory expectations for stress testing (ST) in a credit risk framework for banking book exposures. We introduce and motivate ST; and discuss the function, supervisory requirements and expectations, credit risk parameters, interpretation results with...

The new Basel III rules for liquidity and funding will have an impact on several areas of the banking business. As a consequence, it is useful to identify the key areas within a bank where Basel III has the biggest impact and to define the necessary strategies, processes, and new products to...

The daily returns on leveraged and inverse-leveraged exchange-traded funds (LETFs) are a multiple of the daily returns of a reference index. Because LETFs rebalance their leverage daily, their holding period returns can deviate substantially from the returns of a leveraged investment. While...

This paper discusses a class of methodological issues that frequently arise in risk management systems such as PFE and CVA engines. Simplified methodology and shortcuts come at a price, sometimes a steep one. To account for model deficiencies and a disconnect between the calibration and the...

Events such as the recent global financial crisis, the failure of Lehman Brothers, and the bailout of American International Group, have called increased attention to the opaque workings of the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives markets which have remained unregulated until now. Nevertheless,...

The complex dynamics of world financial markets yield inherent uncertainty and the prospect of periods of enhanced volatility. The turbulent global economic and regulatory environment of the past few years has certainly illustrated this reality. As investment managers interpret clients’...

The majority of commentators, along with the public opinion, are inclined to identify the causes of the last financial crisis in a combination of traditional market and regulatory failures in the operation and regulation of financial markets. Whatever cannot be explained along these lines is...